


madwoman

by spqr



Series: ladies!! [6]
Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: 1970s, F/M, Misogyny, Period-Typical Sexism, Pining, Post-Canon, beth-centric, cold war politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:20:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27600604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: It feels like open heart surgery, seeing Benny across the hotel lobby.
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Series: ladies!! [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1733536
Comments: 21
Kudos: 466





	madwoman

In 1971 Beth Harmon wins the World Chess Championship in Oslo, beating Soviet Vasily Borgov for the second-ever time in her career.

In 1973 she refuses to defend her title against Anatoly Karpov after the FIDE rejects her proposal that no draws be allowed, and in the event of a 9-9 score she retain her title and the prize money be split equally; in refusing to play she forfeits her title.

In 1974 she agrees to an exhibition match against Borgov in Havana. It's billed as the "Revenge Match of the 20th Century." She receives a total of 107 calls and 30 letters from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Treasury informing her that the match is in violation of the embargo against Cuba and that if she participates they will issue a warrant for her arrest, and she will be detained on re-entry to the United States.

Beth has always had a particular talent for solving problems in the most dramatic and difficult fashion possible, so instead of proposing that they play the match without prize money to avoid infringement, she sells her house, packs twelve suitcases, and becomes a fugitive.

(Also, she wins.)

*

For a while she lives in the Budapest home of Soviet defector Lev Alexandrovich, who is very quiet and very clean and plays chess a bit like Beth imagines a computer might until he starts drinking, at which point he plays like he's snorted a bunch of coke and has a cattle prod up his ass; fast and bold moves that seem almost nonsensical until they come together like a piece of abstract art. He's attractive enough, but he has a stern older lover and is as dedicated to monogamy as Beth is to non-monogamy, so when they're not playing Beth mostly putters around the creaky old attic in clothes that cost more than Lev's car worrying over old losses in her head like a loose tooth. She has 1.5 million in her bank account and nothing particularly interesting to do until the World Championship in Morocco next year.

She considers going out and having a drink, but immediately imagines Jolene giving her a tired look and dunking her head in a bucket of ice water like she had to do that one time in Las Vegas. Beth has relapsed enough times that she knows the halcyon burn of that first bender is not worth the shameful, inevitable low of the morning after.

She considers going out and finding someone to fuck. She hasn't really fucked anyone since Cleo in Paris, which was literal ages ago, and she's getting tired of her own fingers, but mostly when she goes out in Budapest she's miserable about how cold and rainy it is and whatever ache between her legs she was looking to cultivate fades away before she can do anything about it. She tries to get herself off once listening to Lev and his lover through the wall, but they're almost silent and all he does when he comes is grunt in a way that sounds sort of painful so no cigar.

Mostly what she thinks about when she masturbates is Benny. It's been seven years since they saw each other, seven years since they had sex, but the night is imprinted on her mind like a magnesium flare, bright white and phantomlike on the back of her eyelids when she blinks. Benny's skinny body, certainly not the most virile man she'd ever seen naked, not even as virile as Harry, certainly not the most well-endowed, but he was very good with his long pianist's fingers and with his mouth and he'd wound her tighter than a fucking piece of saran wrap stretched over a casserole dish that was much too big.

In her more clear-headed and logical moments she reminds herself that genius is not meant to coexist and that two brains the size of theirs would tear each other apart if forced to cohabitate too long; in her sweatier and lonelier and more desperate moments she wishes he were here in Budapest to smile begrudgingly at a chess board and say, "Well, I guess you're alright," and make fun of Lev's serious and mouselike mien and put his hat on her head while she's standing in his grimy kitchen in nothing but a pair of panties and garters and sidle up behind her and drawl scorchingly dirty nonsense in her ear like they're in a peepshow. In her lonelier and more desperate moments she remembers what it was like those few weeks in New York, sequestered in that basement and taking infrequent and distracted excursions to the park down the street which was not even sort of Central Park, Benny carrying that stupid childish knife, murmuring _pawn to queen's rook two_ and _bishop takes king's knight, check_ in the close private space between their faces while they held onto the poles on the subway and swayed with the rickety motion of the train, how it felt to be one of only two minds in the entire country, in the entire crowded metropolis of the Big Apple, capable of speaking and comprehending this specific language.

It was heady. It was like drinking. Better than.

Now, in Budapest, when she thinks of wanting a drink she thinks of Jolene's tired expression and she thinks of Benny on the phone the week after Moscow, the first of five calls that he picked up, saying he was happy to help America beat the Iron Curtain of the Soviet chess team but they were a mistake and she shouldn't call him again. She thinks of how it felt in her stomach to be standing by that payphone in the Moscow airport and have the rug yanked out of her like that, all her ecstatic energy gone in an instant, crashing back down to earth.

She knew even then that she shouldn't base her worth on whether or not Benny was happy with her--especially with Townes standing right behind her, kind and supportive and everything Beth wished for but knew she couldn't have--but he's the only man she's ever wanted to impress mostly because he was the first man she couldn't. So she thinks about that, puttering around Lev Alexandrovich's attic, gazing out the high slanted windows at Szent Istvan Ter, and she wants a drink even more than she did in the first place, but then she thinks of what Benny would say if he knew that she was spiraling, and then she has to stop thinking of Benny entirely because he tends to either shoot her into the stratosphere and yank her back down to earth again in totally equal measure.

Instead of having a drink or finding someone to fuck, she goes out and buys a dog. It's a pitiful, mean-spirited little thing that fits in her purse and likes to pee on Lev's shoes. Lev, sounding angry and a little alarmed at how angry he is, names it Tsaritsa. The way he says it makes it very clear that he means it in the pejorative sense--no chess player worth their salt calls the queen _tsaritsa_ in Russian. Beth doesn't care; she likes the cheekiness of it and adores the dog, and anyway the poor thing hears _Tsaritsa_ too often to respond to anything else.

*

The _Wall Street Journal_ sends someone to interview Beth in exile.

Mostly they're trying to trip her up into condemning communism and swearing allegiance to the capitalist system, which after a few late nights with a Lev's drunk Marxist friends, she's no longer willing to do, and there are entirely too many lines in the finished piece about her "gazing forlornly out at the faceless gray architecture of the socialist state, longing for the Land of the Free," but she also manages to sneak in a scathing condemnation of FIDE.

The reporter, a man named Jimmy Jameson who laughs too much at things that aren't funny, turns suddenly serious and asks, "Can I get a response to the quote by Benny Watts in the most recent issue of _Chess Review?"_

Beth feels like she just had a bucket of ice water dumped on her. Tsaritsa fusses on her lap, asking to be put down; she sets her on the floor and watches her skitter into the other room, then brushes hair off her lime green pants as a stalling tactic. Lev has been hogging the latest _Chess Review_ , and now she guesses she knows why.

"That depends," she says, "on what the quote is."

"You haven't read the article?" Jimmy asks incredulously.

Beth puts on a smile. "I haven't had the time."

Jimmy doesn't quite look like he believes her--there's nothing _but_ time in the Alexandrovich house--but he dutifully pulls his own copy of _Chess Review_ out of his bag. Benny's not on the cover. Benny hasn't been on the cover in a while.

Jimmy flips to an article near the back of the bus. There's a glossy black and white photo of Benny there--the rest of the world has catapulted into the future, but chess is still black and white--so small Beth can't really make it out. She tries to tilt her head surreptitiously to read the headline, but Jimmy folds the magazine in half, looking for his highlights.

"Here we go," he says at last, then reads: "After representing the United States at the 21st Chess Olympiad in Nice, France, Watts had this to say about his wayward once-upon-a-time co-champion of the U.S. Open: 'She loves the spotlight more than she loves the game. Beth's good, she's good as hell, but she's never gonna be as good again as she was in Moscow in '68. She's too distracted.'"

Jimmy watches her expectantly.

Beth feels furious, but it's the same thing she used to feel when he'd taunt her--real anger that she knows shouldn't be real anger. He's playing. It's a game.

"Ms. Harmon?" Jimmy prompts. "Do you have anything to say to that?"

Beth looks him in the eye.

"Yes. Benny talks a big game for someone who hasn't played me in almost a decade."

Jimmy hides his delight poorly. "Is that a challenge?"

"Everything's a challenge," Beth says.

*

 _Most girls just sort of lay there,_ Benny said once, when Beth asked him, wide eyed and startled and still with his come on her hands, why he'd orgasmed so fast. _I wasn't really prepared for your whole..._ he waved at her body, as if to encompass her unashamed nakedness, her eagerness, her participation, her curiosity in bed.

Beth wiped his spend on his stomach--over his feeble protests--and flopped down on her back next to him. _I usually just lay there,_ she admitted. _I just layed there with Harry. I didn't... I don't think I really wanted to touch him. I just didn't want him to leave._

 _You want to touch me?_ Benny checked. His head was turned on the pillow, staring at her.

 _Yeah._ Beth smiled, then felt stupid for smiling, and stopped. _Yeah, I do_.

*

Sex between a man and a woman, Beth thinks, is a lot like chess. One person--usually the man--dominates, while the other rolls over and lets them do what they have to do so that they'll go to sleep and leave them alone. Normally in chess, Beth is the one dominating, which she thinks might be why she doesn't particularly like sex all that much. Men--particularly timid, sweet Harry with his delusions of toothless love and white picket fences--don't like to be dominated in bed. To Beth's limited understanding, it goes against their biology.

But then Benny comes along, more evenly-matched against her in the 64-square world of a chessboard than anyone she's ever met, save Borgov who tends to just walk all over her in twenty moves like she's an infant (and yeah, maybe Beth thinks about Borgov sometimes when she's in bed alone, just holding her down and staring at her with that implacable face of his, moving back and forth over her with resigned Soviet determination, an image that's actually hilariously funny unless she's in a very, very specific mood), and anyway, Benny comes along. He folds her leg up to her chest and holds it with a hand under her knee while he fucks into her, that stupid little mustache skimming over the superheated, sticky skin of her throat, but that's not even the half of it: they've got identical Elo ratings and identical tastes in bed and they go together like rocket fuel and a goddamn match. Beth's not attracted to his body, not really, except that it has Benny in it. It's not just about bodies, what they do in that barebones travesty of a bedroom in Benny's strange basement apartment. It's a meeting of minds.

She goes to play the Konex in Buenos just to scratch the competitive itch. Picks up a particularly winsome admirer in the hotel bar and takes him up to her room.

He looks confused when she asks him to lay on his back.

"Come _on,_ man," she says in Spanish. "Are you serious? It's the seventies."

He gets with the picture once she straddles him, but when she pulls his hair and tells him to talk to her, he looks confused again. It's unsatisfying across the board, and in the end Beth flops onto her back and lets her groupie do it his way, fast and utilitarian, eyes squeezed closed and mouth open and fingers between her legs, thinking of someone else.

 _Get Down Tonight_ plays on repeat over the radio in Munich; Beth feels feverish and reptilian as she slinks from bar to bar, trying to burn off steam the night before the opening round of a big invitational. She spends all of five minutes flirting with a burly bear of a man in the flashing neon lights of a discothèque before he's rucking her skirt up in one of the stalls in the ladies' restroom, pressing her face into the door and shoving inside her. Beth hooks her fingers over the top of the stall and holds on.

In the morning she can't stop shifting in her seat opposite a player from Israel who looks like he's only _maybe_ gotten his first chest hair. For a second she can't help imagining it's Benny she's sitting across from; Benny giving her a knowing look and a sly smile, not allowed to say anything now that the clocks have started and saying enough with his eyes anyway.

She goes back to the discothèque the next night, and the night after that.

(But only to dance.)

*

 _Chess Review_ prints an interview with Anatoly Karpov in which he claims that Beth is afraid to play him, and that's why she forfeited in 1973.

"She has a fantastic chess talent," he says, "but she is, after all, a woman. It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche. No woman can sustain a prolonged battle."

It's 1976 and Beth's sitting in a chair at a hair salon in London getting a Farrah-flip. Her hair is long and bigger than it's ever been.

"If she will come out from wherever she is hiding," Karpov continues, "I will be happy to put her in her place. Sometimes women need a good talking-to."

" _God!"_ Beth throws the magazine across the room, heart racing.

The other women in the salon gape at her.

Beth crosses her arms, glares at herself in the mirror, and seethes.

A month later, she reads in the _Times_ that Soviets are boycotting this year's Chess Olympiad in protest against the nation of Israel. Instead, along with 33 other nations, they're hosting a tournament called the Against Chess Olympiad in Tripoli. Beth had been planning on going to Haifa, but this is where Karpov will be.

She's already in deep enough shit with FIDE; she calls the Against Chess organizers up and informs them she's going to play.

What she's not expecting is for Benny to be there, too.

*

There's something very unsettling about seeing someone for the first time after almost a decade apart. It feels momentous. It feels like open heart surgery, seeing Benny across that hotel lobby. It's hot and perpetually sunny and there are palms in pots beside the tacky red upholstered booths, and Beth is dressed in a way that could uncharitably be called _colonial chic_ but is usually sold as _resort wear_ , lightweight linen pants and a blouse so airy it's almost see-through, hair kept away from her face with a patterned scarf. She has sunglasses on. She's very glad she has sunglasses on, because her eyes are watering like she's just been slapped.

She forces herself to pull her eyes off him and gets into line at the tournament check-in. Shuffling behind a pair of men in kufis, she thinks she hears the low, easy rumble of his laugh, and a swell of anger replaces her embarrassed shame. _What the hell is he doing here,_ she thinks, _what right does he have to surprise me like this,_ even though he can't have known she would be here instead of in Haifa any more than she knew he would be.

She presses her mouth into a tight line as she hears his laugh again, his stumbling Arabic, and now her anger has a dinstinctly different slant: who the hell are these people he's talking to? why isn't he talking to her? they're in the same country, in the same _room_ \--under such circumstances he should only ever be talking to her. He should only ever be smiling at her.

Tsaritsa nips at her heels. The line in front of her has moved. The check-in agent is watching her expectantly. Beth pulls herself together and puts on a happy face.

Day turns into night, desert-blue rolling in across the city while Beth sits on her balcony, Tsaritsa locked in the bathroom inside, smoking her way through a pack of Gauloises. Benny has to be as hyperaware of her presence as she is of his; it's like two wolves being in a forest together, they can smell each other. No doubt he saw her in the lobby. No doubt he's gone out with some of the other, younger, more admiring players, instead of sitting in his room waiting for the phone to ring like her. The wind plays with her Farrah Fawcett hair. A few reporters took pictures of her new 'do down in the lobby; by tomorrow it will be in the papers, accompanied by some insipid misogynistic copy about her fashion choices instead of her chess game. She's been feeling a lot of anger lately, and now she's angry about that, too, and angry that Benny isn't here, or Jolene, or Alma, someone who never tried to classify her. The papers can never decide whether to treat her as a chess player or as a woman; even after more than a decade they don't seem to have developed the toolbox to reconcile the two in any sort of sustainable fashion. Beth is only Beth. She dresses well and enjoys fashion but it doesn't factor into her chess playing ability any more than Benny's dumb cowboy hat and duster and _knife_ , which no one ever bothers writing columns on.

Benny should be here. He should be in her room, boots kicked off just inside the door, feet up on the coffee table while they play slow, lazy, half-interested games of one-on-one bughouse, gazing at her with those molten eyes and that barely-there smile...

Beth drops her head back, groaning in frustration. "Get a hold of yourself, Harmon," she says, and puts out her cigarette.

She takes a cold shower, Tsaritsa yipping outside the fogged glass. She blow-dries her hair. She brushes her teeth and starts to go to bed, then changes her mind and calls down to room service for a slice of cake--no, _two_ slices, actually, whatever cake you think is best, surprise me. She eats both slices, then flops down on the couch in her hotel robe staring at the complimentary bottle of champagne that they sent up with it, chewing on her thumb.

Tsaritsa chooses the perfect moment to bite Beth's heel so hard it bleeds; Beth swears and ties the dog's leash to the towel bar and pours the champagne down the drain while the pure white towel wrapped around her foot turns slowly crimson.

*

Beth read last year that Benny had been invited to play against the Greenblatt computer program at M.I.T. and beat it all three times. She'd been a little jealous, but logically she couldn't go to Boston without being arrested by the U.S. government, so she supposed she could see why Greenblatt had chosen Benny instead of her. In a way it was even a courtesy.

She played through each of the games, chest hollowed out by some sort of achey wistfulness. More than she wanted to touch him, she thought she wanted to play against him again. It was always like he was reading her mind, when they played; the trick wasn't so much hiding her strategy from him as it was misdirecting him. Some coy batting of the eyes, _rook to king's pawn six,_ peeling off her stockings and enjoying the way his eyes never strayed from the board, like he knew the essence of her was there, in her game, not in her body.

( _Mate,_ Benny proving himself smarter than the smartest computer in the world.

 _Mate,_ Beth echoing, half a world away, feeling every inch of it.)

*

"I thought I was a mistake," Beth says, the third night in Tripoli. She's standing in the open door to her hotel room in the same fluffy hotel robe she's been sleeping in since she got here, her makeup from the day scrubbed off and her hair up in a towel turban. She really wants Benny to come inside but she's feeling vindictive.

Tsaritsa tries to run past her into the hallway; Beth blocks her with her leg.

Benny looks sort of alarmed. "What the hell is that?"

"A dog," Beth says.

“No. I don't think so. That looks like an overgrown rat. Where the hell did you find it, some radioactive Soviet sewer?"

Beth glares, and slams the door.

"Beth!" Benny calls a moment later, knocking. "Beth, come on. Open the door."

Beth makes sure Tsaritsa is closed up in the bathroom before she opens the door again. Benny's leaning against the doorframe, sort of defeated, but looking like he's in it for the long haul. When the door opens he bolts upright, surprised. "Are you gonna let me in?"

"I don't know," Beth says. "Why should I?"

Benny drags a hand over his face. "I didn't say _you_ were a mistake--"

"What, so now I'm delusional?"

"--I said _we_ were a mistake. As in, you and me together."

Beth wants to argue more but can't figure out a good angle. "Fine," she says. She steps away from the door to let him inside.

Benny kicks it closed behind him. He kicks his boots off just inside, tosses his duster over the arm of the couch, takes off his hat, sets it on a table. It's like no time at all has passed, except for how there's this steel rod of estrangement and unspoken hurt holding them apart.

He flops down on the couch and says, "I saw your game this morning."

Beth shoots him a skeptical look. "I didn't see you."

"I was up in the mezzanine. Eleven moves, very nice. Maybe even a record. Of course, that guy you had wasn't much of a contender--"

"I'm not sure if you're complimenting me or insulting me."

“Neither am I," he admits. "I never really know with you. Every time I see you I want to thrash you at chess and also take you to bed. It's confusing."

"Why is it confusing?"

"I don't feel that way about any of my other opponents."

"All your other opponents are men."

"Well, even if they _were_ women." Benny gazes up at her. She's standing over by the open balcony doors, arms folded over her chest, looking out at the hazy lights of the city, and Benny feels like he can't tear his eyes away. "At this point I'm pretty sure it's just you, Beth."

She pretends she doesn't want to look at him. "What happened to that 'mistake' stuff?"

"Yeah," Benny says. "Yeah, that's still true. I still believe it."

"Then what are you doing here?"

Benny drops his feet on the floor and sits forward abruptly. "You're not still with that Townes guy, are you?" he asks.

Beth blinks. She feels like she has whiplash. "What? No, we were never--No."

"Good, because here's the thing. I've done the whole lone wolf, unapproachable genius act, and I don't think I like it very much anymore. I don’t think it’s worth it. Even if we’re bad for each other, it’s better than being alone."

Beth's gearing up to feeling insulted. "That's all?"

"No, Beth, that's not all. You're the only person on earth I don't have to talk down to."

She laughs. "For fuck's sake, Benny, do you hear yourself?"

He waves her off. "Come on, don't pretend you haven't thought the same thing."

Beth clams up.

"Yeah," Benny says. "I thought so."

"Borgov," Beth blurts.

Benny frowns. "What? What about him?"

"You don't have to talk down to Borgov, either."

Benny raises his eyebrows at her, like _are you serious?_ , and when Beth doesn't make a hasty and awkward retraction he says, "Sure, not about chess. But he wouldn't get my jokes. And I'm willing to bet he'd be a limp fish in bed."

"Actually," Beth says, grinning, "I've thought about that a lot."

Benny's expression darkens.

*

 _There's a reason geniuses don't marry other geniuses,_ Beth gasps, as Benny's mustache--he _still_ hasn't shaved that fucking mustache--skims below her navel, heading south. Benny lifts his head long enough to drawl, _Who said anything about marriage?_ before he gets back to work, and Beth supposes she doesn't have much of a high opinion of marriage anyways, considering she's never really seen a successful one and can't cook more than a ham sandwich or sunny side up eggs and isn't much interested in having children and doesn't think Benny is much interested in anything but eating her out and playing chess, both of which are fine and worthy activities in her book.

Beth was listening to the radio before he showed up and it's still playing softly, the soft happy notes of _Lola_ by the Kinks plucking around the ceiling in shades of orange and pink and lime green, and Tsaritsa has quieted down in the bathroom and Benny's skinny ripcord body heaves between her legs while he holds her knees open with his hands and Beth's wet hair spills over the pillow and who the hell knows what it will look like tomorrow but who the hell _cares_. _Budapest sucked,_ she tells him, breathless and suddenly desperate for some sort of comiseration, some admission that he missed her too, _Budapest really, really sucked,_ and she isn't talking about the city at all, and Benny shoots her a mischievous look and _sucks_ so hard she probably wakes Karpov at the end of the hall.

When they're done they watch the sunrise in the nude with sweat cooling on their skin and share what's left of Beth's pack of Gauloises. The chess board is inside and neither of them bother going to get it. They can both hold the board well enough in their heads that there's no point exerting that much effort.

In the morning they'll both go face second-round opponents so below them that they barely have to be awake to do it, and maybe they'll come up against each other in semi-finals but Beth is going to be the one to face Karpov in the finals; sorry Benny, that's just how it is.

He leans across the table to put out his cigarette and stays to brush her bangs out of her face. "I like your hair," he says.

Beth frowns, pulling the still-wet strands in front of her eyes. "It's not drying right. It's going to be a fucking mess in the morning."

Benny huffs. "That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant."

Beth touches his face gently. It’s more reserved now, quieter, more familiar, but he looks at her with the same surprised wonder as the first time she touched him in that college bar in Ohio. Even after all this time.

"I know what you meant," Beth repeats.

Benny wraps his hand in her hair, tight enough to tug, and pulls her into a kiss.

(It's a draw.)

**Author's Note:**

> When the rules of the game changed to make the queen the strongest piece on the board, 15th century chess players began to call it “queen’s chess,” or, pejoratively, “madwoman’s chess."


End file.
